Autonomy Engineer Intern, Reinforcement Learning, 2027 (Zurich)

Skydio is the leading US drone company and the world leader in autonomous flight, the key technology for the future of drones and aerial mobility.

The Skydio team combines deep expertise in artificial intelligence, best-in-class hardware and software product development, operational excellence, and customer obsession to empower a broader, more diverse audience of drone users, from utility inspectors to first responders, soldiers in battlefield scenarios, and beyond.

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the role:Skydio builds the world’s most advanced autonomous drones used across inspection, public safety, defense, cinematography, and more

Your research won’t languish in a paper: it will fly, shaping how pilots and operators complete real missions in complex environments.

• Develop and deploy reinforcement learning (and adjacent policy-learning methods) that make Skydio aircraft plan, navigate, and control themselves more intelligently, safely, reliably, and efficiently across our ecosystem: handheld apps, ground control, cloud autonomy services, and fleet workflows.

How you'll make an impact:Navigation & avoidance in the wild: Train policies that adapt online to cluttered 3D scenes (forests, bridges, urban canyons), complementing our stack for robust obstacle avoidance and dynamic goal-seeking.

RL-augmented planning: Fuse learned cost shaping / value functions with trajectory optimization for smooth, agile flight with tight safety envelopes and mission constraints.

Sim to Real at scale: Build scalable datasets and training loops with Isaac Lab, domain randomization, residual learning, and safety filters; validate on real drones weekly.

Human-in-the-loop shared control: Learn assistive policies that blend pilot intent, autonomy priors, and uncertainty-aware behaviors for intuitive control handoffs.

Fleet & multi-agent: Explore decentralized coordination for coverage, pursuit, and collaborative mapping with minimal comms.

What makes this internship different:Real hardware cadence: Prototype in sim, the.